How can I create a memory leak in Java?

Question

I just had an interview, and I was asked to create a memory leak with Java.

Needless to say, I felt pretty dumb having no clue on how to eve

Answer 1

You are able to make memory leak with sun.misc.Unsafe class. In fact this service class is used in different standard classes (for example in java.nio classes). You can't create instance of this class directly, but you may use reflection to do that.

Code doesn't compile in Eclipse IDE - compile it using command javac (during compilation you'll get warnings)

import java.lang.reflect.Constructor;
import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import sun.misc.Unsafe;


public class TestUnsafe {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
        Class unsafeClass = Class.forName("sun.misc.Unsafe");
        Field f = unsafeClass.getDeclaredField("theUnsafe");
        f.setAccessible(true);
        Unsafe unsafe = (Unsafe) f.get(null);
        System.out.print("4..3..2..1...");
        try
        {
            for(;;)
                unsafe.allocateMemory(1024*1024);
        } catch(Error e) {
            System.out.println("Boom :)");
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

}